A Study Of College English Reading Teaching Based On Relevance Theory

Reading is always one of the most important activities for foreign languagelearners. As a matter of fact, reading is a cognitive process involving the text and thelanguage in use. Therefore, how to make a reading teaching class successful is alwaysone of the challenges that teachers or researchers face nowadays. Although manyscholars have made some related researches about English reading teaching fromdifferent perspectives in linguistics in the past few years, and some of them haveproposed certain useful reading methods, strategies and models, they can not cater toall of the English reading teaching problems as the college English reading teachingdevelops gradually.This thesis is an empirical research based on relevance theory. The author tries toexplore the reading activity from the cognitive perspective in combination with thepros and cons of the reading models proposed by previous researchers in the pastdecades. Considering that reading is a process of communication between the readerand the writer via the text, the author specified the experiment process into words,sentences and passages comprehension ability training based on Rumehart’s interactivemodel.From the perspective of relevance theory, reading activity is actually aninferential communicative activity in which readers have to seek for relevanceconstantly, while the readers’ cognitive environment is very critical for them to seekfor the optimal relevance, so this thesis also covers some important notions relating torelevance theory respectively, such as ostensive-inferential communication, encodingand decoding, relevance, cognitive environment and so on, which further support thetheoretical basis for this thesis to some extent.The experimental subjects for this thesis are students majoring in BusinessJapanese from two classes in Pingxiang College. This class experimental teachinglasted for12weeks and used some research methods like questionnaire, Englishreading tests and after-class interview, etc. This study tries to answer those threequestions:(1) What are the main factors that influence students’ reading abilityaccording to relevance theory;(2) Is relevance-theoretical teaching method moreeffective than grammar-translation method in achieving reading comprehension;(3)What kind of feedback would the teacher get from the students after the readingteaching method based on RT. Finally, according to the experiment analysis, this thesis achieves a conclusionthat the students in the relevance-theory-based experimental class improved muchmore than the students in the control class which adopted the traditionalgrammar-translation reading teaching method. What’s more, the interest and theirwilling to take part in the reading activities of the experimental class also improved alot.Therefore, it has been proved that the reading teaching method based on RT ishelpful and meaningful to develop students’ inferential ability, cultivate their Englishlearning interest and improve their reading comprehension ability, which furtherimproves their comprehensive language abilities.